Two Holes

Two Holes

       by Annie Oakley Reemer

yes he said

and no she said

and then they turned away

from talk and did

and that is everything

there's to this tale

for it takes us on tour

of all that ever was

If you are ever in the mood to take a side trip on your way through Brandon, Manitoba, you might travel highway forty-nine south through the twin towns Sidney and Golash to view the monument to the last buffalo. The stone cairn stands sentinel above the towns, quietly grazing on a hilltop of prairie grass undisturbed by plow and horse since the days that these animals provided for the Cree, Ojibwa and settlers at the turn of the century. The plaque reads thus:

Here, at this location, the last buffalo was seen by Julian Morrisette and a party of hunters on March 11, 1947. Just down below here, by the shore of Max Lake, one hundred yards from where you stand, the very last buffalo paused lonely and confused by the water, neither eating nor drinking. It was as if it knew that the last days of its noble empire had come to an end. The party shared the animal among family and village members in a time-honored aboriginal tradition.  

What the buffalo had never enjoyed, it enjoyed now without stint. Privacy is a great blessing. I should know, having grown up in a family of eleven siblings and three members of the extended family in a house the size of a double garage.

       I was the twelfth child and all of us still lived together in that shack till my thirteenth year when the second youngest left, since it was that or sleeping with the chickens that were his especial charge. Bill, the oldest at forty-three, could be seen sitting where my mother sat or gardening where my mother gardened. He carried the lunch and the hoes to the strawberry patch and sat in the grass watching her bend and work the earth. Willie, the next in line, knew horses and helped father harness them, saddle them, feed them, shoe them and groom them. Father and Willie were inseparable unless you consider sleep a separation. Willie wore overalls without a shirt during the summer and overalls with one in winter. Otherwise, Willie Jacob Haman Hamm (he was a proud one as his insistence on having all his names spoken tells you) kept to himself, not given to public appearance with his lame leg and his one arm ending in a little hand where his elbow should have been. He whistled when he thought no one could hear, songs such as "Soldier Boy," and "Jesus Help Me Through the Storm."

(To be continued)  

Unencumbered by Any Sadness

Unencumbered by Any Sadness

       by Dugly R.

 twa corbies

     by willard willhelm whinn

sniggles was a willing hound

he held the world in awe

but when he turned to eating dirt

he wore his awe away

Sniggles bit himself, howled, sniffed at the pain, considered immediately biting himself again, sighed, and settled down to sleep. This was just outside the caravan, in the sun, on a May morning, with the promise of summer in the air.

       Sniggle's mistress Nelly performed with the circus. She had done since she was a little girl at the request of her uncle. Her parents, Linda and William Singh, reluctant, gave in when the money sounded too good to pass up. Her dog (Sniggles above) whom she eventually claimed was her uncle reincarnated, kept to her like a burr. If anyone tried anything Sniggles could be counted on to show strong resistance. His bark alone had deterred many a wanton advance and caused more than one man to rely of a sudden on his heels.

       Shortly after she joined the circus her parents died in a trolley accident and were interred in their local village far from anywhere that Nelly ever could go. Her uncle took care of her instead until he himself met with an accident, the latter event being the focus of this story. Nelly had felt about him with ambivalence and he had felt about her with equal emotion. Though they cared deeply about each other, when time came for their great parting neither suffered either long or hard. They had shared a single caravan for ten years, ever since Nelly turned six, as I said, and now that vehicle was hers alone. Nelly reveled in the freedom from tight quarters, little food, men playing cards late into the night, women coming and going and a table too little for two. She could do now what she wanted, wear as much or as little as she pleased when inside and eat when and what she chose. Now she had, she felt, really joined the circus.

       On the day of the accident she got the rope tighter as he requested. If she obeyed she got extra tanpan and sniplops with acorn milk. If she resisted, out of love for him or out of sympathy for his pain, she received a much smaller portion and found it difficult to walk or work till the following day's meal came her way. Then, when he was accustomed once more to this new tightness, she finally acted on his whispered entreaties and turned the wheel one more full circle. He could not speak now but his eyes moved up and down, which meant that he wished for another turn of the wheel. This was more than she had ever done before and more than she could bear. Seven full turns after the arrow.

       She shook her head. He grew pale and sad-looking and she knew that he had fully intended this time to break his record and be able once more to bite himself as he had managed in his younger years. He was sure, she could tell from his silence at mealtimes these last few days, from his straight gait as well as his furtive looks behind him, that he felt that he was entirely ready now to cross an uncrossed line and to grasp what had eluded him for so long.

       She turned to walk to the release button but something in him made her hesitate, and then quickly she took ahold of the wheel and turned it, vigorously so as not to make him suffer slow pain, fully rotating it without looking into his eyes. His face now came right up to his buttocks and between. He almost smiled as he opened his lips and mouth wide and valiant, wide with victory and valiant with effort, and down came the teeth about his own anus. He bit deeply and hard. He would have screamed but for the constriction of his throat.

       He would have screamed but he died instead.  He suffocated at that moment having not breathed now for many a minute and unaware that he was not breathing. Nelly did not know that he had died. He was there curled up with a mouthful of nether for ten minutes before she realized that he was not experiencing pleasure any longer but had passed to another state of some sort. She pushed the release button and he unwound in a hurry till his teeth reached their nadir and he stayed there, circular, unable entirely to unrecoil, dentalis clenched as if in earnest about his rectum. Rigor mortis set in before they came to release him. They buried him in a circular grave.

       Now when she walks through the caravan she feels uncle's curled presence but does not mind. She is not someone to hold a grudge or to hate anyone for more than a minute. She has her own odd, circuitous thinking at times. Mostly, however, she is content to live alone unencumbered by any sadness or other persons' needs.   

Unshown in du Musée du Louvre (cont'd)

 Unshown in du Musée du Louvre (cont'd)

       by A-Secret-Member-of-the-Rothchilds Doug

and then when all seemed said and done

a monster leaped aboard

him peotr wroth and filled with hate

lept up upon and cut

from ear to grinning ear nor smiled

and thus the end came to the beast

who till that time all ruled

and soon the lion laid the lamb

and children lovely made

whose like till that fair time none'd known

Worry over the rigidity of the jaw when the labors of a year bring only mild criticism and nothing more. Linger in the knowledge that no sleight of hand, no heart-felt hope, no libation to the gods, no self-inflicted wound will ever reconcile a younger brother to his lateness nor an older one to his duty. Listen intently at coffee break to the conversation of the boss with his secretary and feel the way she notices everything around her then, with a quickening of all the parts that make her a thing. Suppose for a brief hour that you lay now on a floating mattress in the moonshine off the coast of Honduras, the arid matter between water and sky as old as electricity. Ponder the massiveness of whales just a few feet beneath your kayak as you drift through Sitka Sound. Allow yourself to briefly study the dangerous flightiness of the woman your bother will be wedding in another week. Question whether sound slips shoddily into your ear or is pushed in by the force of will or intention. Smell and internalize the whetedness of an unripe lemon ground upon a juice glass and accidentally rubbed into eye and nose. Place in categories all the men who have noticed you and wished to say something to you that would make you happy and loving. Split hairs with yourself about precisely where the desire to live turns a corner and begins to look at itself. Will, for a moment, the death of the need to speak, making the future of your large life a matter to gather dust or to sweep under the rug. Pretend that you are ten and alone in Paris where your parents have abandoned you with a pocket full of francs and with a miniature by Picasso in your small suitcase, as well as two changes of clothing and a Euro-pass for the train. Plan for one evening the meeting of Bobby Fisher and Boris Spatsky in your living room and you lying on the couch watching their dilrny interchanges. Entertain the idea of moving your bed into the garage for three months each summer so that you can come and go as you wish without having to either announce yourself or wash and bathe each evening. Do not covet your neighbor's wife since she is Jewish, plays canasta, comes outside mornings in her ratty nightgown to check on her flowers and says things to you like, "My husband is in Toronto for the week and won't be back till next Tuesday." Drive your Toyota Corolla over a buffalo jump and leap out just in time. No one will figure out your subterfuge. Rev your Suburban's engine till it is ruined and a month to go on its warranty. Give up your time-share at Falcon Lake and the ten thousand dollars invested in it after twenty years because you've grown tired of it, boring as all is there. Plant cigar tobacco and see if you can make it grow in Manitoba. Learn to roll cigars. Specify to your wife the precise tickling that makes you still and content. Loan money to your wayward daughter of twenty-five who follows you wherever you move, even when it is right across the country.      

Unshown in du Musée du Louvre

                   

       

Unshown in du Musée du Louvre

         by Little-Think-Tank Dr. Eimer

                                    once upon a short eternity

                                    a being made the world

                                    he did not bring it into was

                                    or will or be but splashed

                                    the whole thing t'ward

                                    we he said and like he said

                                    and maybe it will go the way

                                    i thought it would but no

                                    it never did for all the things

                                    that he allowed or thought

                                    or just encouraged would not

                                    could not and refused to should

                                    then he became not sick or mad

                                    nor filled with endlessness

                                    of great and fierce remorse

                                    he watched instead while thousand

                                    strange and wild anomalies

                                    arranged themselves in lines

                                    unknown and not at all chaotic

`                                   these he smiled at smiled and called

                                    his own their odd and crazy loves

                                    their way of being nice

                                    and ev'n their thoughts of self-protection

                                    montgomery wilde nash kroetsch

                                    dant cooley yeats and arnason

                                    brandt livesay moodie cohen braun

                                    elves makers of our selves

Notice how not one stone is left unturned when the hunters have come over the wall but they will have the fox out of hiding? Notice how wild a place looks till you have lived at the site for a few days and then it all seems tame as gorse in your back yard? Observe the nature of stars on a cold night in the backwoods, how they glitter as if they knew nothing but the art of gilding porcelain? Think for a moment about the odd angle of rock sometimes where a million years ago its weight brought it from its height and sent it down to the lake a hundred feet below. The crevasse it left is at right angles to all the other right angle of granite and becomes a cave where indigenous people come to lay offerings of tobacco and cloth.  Perceive the immediate ease with which a gull, white against the dark of conifers, follows the wake of a passing motorboat, searching for minnows disoriented by the thrusting propellers. Concern yourself for a moment with the rawness of December that, snow-chilled, gathers around the bare ankles of ladies in automobiles inching along in traffic after a late night at the Theatre Centre. Speak out the odd names of tyrants who wake at three a.m. to go to the bathroom and notice the large moon that brightens the pillars of their palaces. Presage a small person crayoning colors that in their dreams they have selected for their next day's palette.  Consider the uneaten golden waffle that sits in its dish on the counter next to the breadbox until it is discarded two days later as inedible, and above it, in the blue cupboard, the enduring syrup. Whisper the words that might make a simple thing of a lover who has left for Turkey to spend a year studying political science and might not ever return to see you happy again, as happy as you were the month you knew her before her departure. Contemplate the sun's light on a stretch of dirt road not wide enough to allow two vehicles to pass, where this mile willows, and that mile only grass, borders it, witness now and then to the churning of dust and stones thrown up by some swift passage. Think Rudy Wiebe's particular thoughts about natives and reserves and the strain of purpose his writings attempt to unload. Reflect what neat objects remain shown and unshown in du Musée du Louvre in galleries, walkways, dungeons, and still unrestored cells and catacombs. Remember the little breast of your neice as she bent to play the banjo, with first her right and then her left hand on the strings.

(to be continued)